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Conina on 11 April 2018
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The_Liquid_Laser said:

GBA had N-Gage as competition.  It is not much competition, but it is competition.  Switch will have PS5 and XBox4 (or whatever they call it) as competitors so it is too early to call it a winner.  And you left out a whole pile of losers.  There are tons and tons, but if I just point out Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft and Sega, then it looks like this.

Winners that chose to forego BC: SNES, PS4 
Winners that chose to include BC: PS2, Wii, GBA, DS, 3DS

Losers that chose to forego BC: N64, Saturn, Virtual Boy, DreamCast, GameCube, PS3*, PS Vita
Losers that chose to include BC: Genesis, XBox360, XB1, Wii U

*the vast majority of PS3s sold were not backwards compatible with PS2 games.

The list of winners has a lot more consoles that are backwards compatible.  The list of losers has a lot more consoles that are not backwards compatible.  Sega and Microsoft never had a console that was #1 for the generation, but their most successful consoles were the Genesis and Xbox360, respectively.  Both of these consoles have backwards compatibility.  

The data clearly shows that backwards compatibility strongly correlates with success.  For a site dedicated to looking at sales data, there seems to be a surprising number of people who really resent what the data says.

I wouldn't call PS3 + Xbox 360 "losers"... they both sold more than 80 million untis (each more than 80% of the winner) and both sold more software than the Wii. It's as close as it can get for that generation.

The_Liquid_Laser said:

The data clearly shows that backwards compatibility strongly correlates with success.  For a site dedicated to looking at sales data, there seems to be a surprising number of people who really resent what the data says.

No it doesn't. Without handhelds it is a tie on home consoles.

And in handheld space, GBA, DS and 3DS would probably have won even without BC due to strong software support.

Or do you really think N-Gage, PSP and Vita would have won if the Nintendo handhelds didn't have BC?